Homo Faber (film)

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Movie
German title Homo Faber
Original title Homo Faber
Country of production France , Germany , Greece
original language German , English
Publishing year 1991
length 117 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Volker Schlöndorff
script Rudy Wurlitzer
production Klaus Hellwig ,
Eberhard Junkersdorf ,
Vasilis Katsoufis ,
Bodo Scriba ,
Ernst Alexander von Eschwege
music Stanley Myers
camera Yorgos Arvanitis ,
Pierre Lhomme
cut Dagmar Hirtz
occupation

Homo Faber is a film by director Volker Schlöndorff from 1991. It is based on the novel Homo faber by the Swiss writer Max Frisch .

action

The engineer Walter Faber met Herbert Hencke on a business flight. When the plane has to make an emergency landing in the desert, it turns out that he is the brother of his college friend Joachim, with whom he has lost touch. Faber decides to join Hencke, who is traveling to the jungles of Guatemala, where Joachim owns a tobacco plantation. At the end of a ghostly journey through the jungle, they find Joachim's body. Faber's friend had hanged himself with a cord in his office.

Back in New York, Faber leaves his lover Ivy and goes on a boat trip to Europe. During the one-week stay on board, he met the young Elisabeth and fell in love with her. He decides to accompany Elisabeth, who wants to visit her mother in Athens. During the trip, Faber finds out that Sabeth, as he calls Elisabeth, is the daughter of his former college friend Hanna. He had wanted to marry Hanna 21 years ago, but she refused because he had only spoken of "your" instead of "our common" child.

On the beach near Athens, Sabeth is bitten by a snake, trips and falls miserably. Faber then takes her to an Athens hospital under great circumstances. Although the snakebite can be successfully treated with a serum, the young woman dies of an undiagnosed skull base fracture as a result of the fall.

Since Sabeth was in the hospital, Faber has lived with Hanna and learns from her (before Sabeth's death) that he is her father and that he slept with his daughter.

The film ends with Faber's desperation over the finality of Sabeth's death.

Emergence

As early as the mid-1970s, the Paramount studios had offered Volker Schlöndorff a film version of the material, but he refused because he saw difficulties in implementation. In 1988, however, a life crisis aroused Schlöndorff's interest in the template. As his motivation for the film adaptation of the novel, he stated that it was a masterpiece of European literature that he could not avoid. After the film rights had passed through different hands for 30 years and returned to Max Frisch at the beginning of 1988, a contact was established between the author and the director. Filming began in early April 1990; The film was released in German cinemas in March 1991. It started in Switzerland on May 12, 1991; a few weeks after Frisch's death.

Reviews

The film adaptation is considered a failure by the critics; Only individual performances were approved.

  • epd Film : “Sam Shepard is the best thing about Schlöndorff's film; he can be seen in almost every scene and yet cannot save him from falling into the banal. (…) Schlöndorff approaches the book too reverently: He illustrates every twist of the fable, tries to incorporate as much text as possible into the film through voice-overs and to imitate Frisch's literary style through nested flashbacks. (...) This turns his Homo Faber into a film that tells a story that is far too simple with far too much effort. "
  • Fischer Film Almanach : “Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy and Barbara Sukowa would have made a great film possible with their acting presence. The script and direction, however, lack the audacity to adequately transfer Frisch's artistic verve into the medium of the image. "
  • Lexicon of international film : “A drama designed to interpret the Oedipus tragedy based on Max Frisch's novel, which describes the stages of a false self-definition in sometimes overwhelming images, but mostly too reverently and clumsily. Above all, the believable leading actor makes clear the process of the painfully imposed self-knowledge of a person who refuses to believe in a higher rule. "
  • Cinema : “The novel, based on the Oedipus tragedy, is required reading at every school. Schlöndorff, a specialist in literary adaptations such as “ The Tin Drum ”, turned them into strong images, but couldn't really breathe life into the material. Conclusion: Effective art cinema based on a large template "
  • Positif : “What could have been a gripping melodrama resembles a dime novel. The film is icy and hopelessly serious, the dialogues stilted and empty, the characters move like automatons without fate turning them into tragic. The pictures approach annoying postcard views. The only good reason to watch the movie is Julie Delpy. She turns an impossible role into a romantic heroine, a sensual and innocent nanny. "

Trivia

Although Faber specifically writes on a Hermes Baby in the novel , he uses an Olivetti Lettera 22 in the film.

Awards

  • In 1992 the film received a Silver Film Award at the German Film Prize and was nominated for the Gold Film Award.
  • In 1992 the film received the producer award at the Bavarian Film Prize .
  • Also in 1992, Volker Schlöndorff received the Gilde Film Prize in silver.
  • The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of release for Homo Faber . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , November 2007 (PDF; test number: 65 331 V / DVD / UMD).
  2. ↑ a b epd film no. 3/1991, joint work of Evangelical Journalism, Frankfurt a. M., pp. 39-40
  3. ^ Horst Schäfer, Walter Schobert (ed.): Fischer Film Almanach 1992. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-11198-6 , pp. 169-170.
  4. ↑ Homo Faber. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. ↑ Cinema.de: [1]
  6. ↑ Positif No. 368, October 1991, p. 65 (“Ce qui aurait pu être un prenant mélodrame ressemble à un roman de gare. Le film est glacial et désespérément sérieux, les dialogues prétentieux et vides, les personnages se meuvent comme des automates qu'aucun destin ne guide vers le tragique, et l'image (…) aligne d'énervantes cartes postales. (…) La seule bonne raison de voir le film, c'est Julie Delpy. D'un rôle impossible, elle fait une véritable herroïne romantique, femme-enfant sensuelle et innocente. ")

literature

Web links